Integrated electronic circuits need all kinds of bias current or voltage generating stages. In order to provide specific temperature dependent effects and to compensate for temperature dependent behavior of the circuitry, bias current or bias voltage generators with positive or negative temperature coefficients (PTC, NTC) are used. The resistance of a device with an NTC decreases with rising temperature. Typically, these NTC-based current generators are combined with components having a positive temperature coefficient (PTC) having together reduced or no temperature dependency. One prior art solution for generating an NTC current uses a feedback loop to force a base-emitter voltage (VBE) of a bipolar transistor or a forward voltage of a diode across a resistor. This causes the current through the resistor to have the NTC of the bipolar transistor's base emitter voltage VBE. If the feedback circuitry should have very low power consumption, the resistance of the resistor should be very large or the VBE has to be very small. However, the range and the flexibility of VBE is very restricted and it typically amounts to 700 to 800 mV resulting in a resistance of several MΩ for a target current of several hundred nA. A resistor having such a high resistance requires a lot of chip area if implemented as a typical sheet resistor.